The Effects of Affordable, High-quality Child Care on Family Income, the Gender Earnings Gap, and Women’s Retirement Security

Introduction

Child care is a financial and logistical challenge for families as well as a challenge for meeting their children’s developmental needs. This is especially the case for those with lower incomes.

Families cope by working less, making do with lower-quality and patchwork care alternatives,
forgoing other basic needs to pay for child care, or in some cases dropping out of the
labor force altogether. While the squeeze is most acutely felt when children are infants
and toddlers, the reality is that the lack of afordable and high-quality child care options
has consequences for families long after children enter kindergarten, compromising the
economic and retirement security of families, and particularly women, for their entire lives.

At the same time, child care providers, 93 percent of whom are women—disproportionately
immigrant women and women of color—earn poverty wages for doing essential work that
allows our economy to function and our communities to thrive. In fact, even prior to the
pandemic, 16 percent of child care workers lived in poverty—twice the rate for workers
overall, with many struggling to afford care for their own children.

Parents are paying more than they can afford. Providers are not being paid enough. In short,
the lack of public investment in care infrastructure is one important reason that women—as
both paid child care providers and mothers—bring home less pay, experience higher poverty
rates than men at every stage of life, and are less secure in retirement.

Source: National Women’s Law Center, Center of Poverty & Social Policy (2021). A Lifetime’s Worth of Benefits.